TORONTO -- Although "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck" paints a thrillingly detailed portrait of its tragic subject, the film also reveals much about his widow, Courtney Love.

In creating the film, director Brett Morgen sifted through a sprawling treasure trove of the revered rocker's never-before-unearthed home videos and personal audiotapes (diary entries read aloud, basically).

Some of the footage is almost unbearably intimate, in particular the home videos of Love and Cobain affectionately cavorting in a heroin haze.

And while Love has long been a target of blame and derision, the footage reveals a much more complicated, mutually destructive relationship.

"For over 20 years, the public has come to know Courtney through the media's (filter)," Morgen said in a telephone interview.

"One of the interesting things about 'Montage of Heck' is we experience Courtney through Kurt's eyes. And who we come to meet are two young 20-year-olds who are intoxicated with a toxic love.

"But I think the film really challenges viewers who come to the movie with predisposed ideas about Courtney," he added.

"But that was not from any sort of cinematic trickery. That was simply what existed on the footage I saw."

And oh, the footage Morgen saw -- provided to the Oscar-nominated director not by Love, by the way, but her daughter, Frances Cobain.

He ultimately devoted nearly eight years to stitching together the film, which will screen in Canadian theatres for one night only on Monday.

With Nirvana's tunefully reckless rock serving as the ideal soundtrack, Morgen's film traces Cobain's transition from a "hyper-sensitive" teen, devastated by his parents' divorce, to the reluctant icon receding rapidly into addiction.

During one sequence, Cobain himself dispassionately recounts a high-school suicide attempt where he lay across the train tracks, weighted down by cement blocks, and was spared only by the fact that an oncoming locomotive sped by on the other track.

It's not as though Cobain's too-short life suffered from a lack of scrutiny. But by avoiding Cobain's guarded interviews in favour of his unfiltered personal documents, Morgen feels he's provided new perspective.

"(Audiences) didn't realize there was so much more to the picture -- that there was so much more art, so much more music, so much more experience," he said.

"You're seeing Kurt laughing and loving and these different sides of him that were squirrelled away: his romanticism, his humour.

"He was only in the public eye for three years and he was never that comfortable. One of the things you see in the film is he's most comfortable when he's by himself."